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Monday, June 15, 2026
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
The social justice activist, writer, and publisher Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914) was a Kentucky belle turned restless Kansas housewife who reinvented herself in Manhattan around 1900 to, in her words, “fight for the poor with my pen.”
Living on the Lower East Side, she singlehandedly published her own magazine, The East Side, focusing on desperate immigrant poverty and calling for the world to heed and help. She raged against the city's xenophobes, cruel slumlords, and brutal policemen, while also documenting her own challenges publishing her magazine, combating skepticism and misogyny as she distributed her own words in print. To experience what the poor endured as peddlers and beggars, she sometimes reported undercover, dressed in shawls, playing music on the streets, as rich passersby ignored her and other beggars gave her coins. To draw more people into her causes and attract subscribers, she made sure to have fun, too; she partied often with her fellow bohemian reformers, known as the Ragged Edge Klub, and became widely known as a Queen of Bohemia.
Norris was also known for documenting her own paranormal experiences: moments of telepathy with relatives, sightings of ghosts of loved ones, and accurate dream premonitions. In early 1914, she mailed out an East Side issue with a description of her recent dream that she would die soon, and days later her heart failed at a Ragged Edge Klub dinner.
In this talk, join Eve Kahn will summarize the accomplishments and paranormal writings of Zoe (as everyone called her), based on Kahn’s new book Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham U. Press).
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn is a regular contributor to The New York Times (where she served as weekly Antiques columnist, 2008-2016) among other publications. Her new biography of Zoe Anderson Norris is a finalist for a Sarton prize from the Story Circle Network and has been called "a daring story told with exceptional verve" (Amy Reading, Pulitzer finalist biographer of New Yorker editor Katharine White). Kahn's 2019 book, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan U. Press), won awards from groups including the Connecticut League of History Organizations.
Monday, June 15, 2026
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
The social justice activist, writer, and publisher Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914) was a Kentucky belle turned restless Kansas housewife who reinvented herself in Manhattan around 1900 to, in her words, “fight for the poor with my pen.”
Living on the Lower East Side, she singlehandedly published her own magazine, The East Side, focusing on desperate immigrant poverty and calling for the world to heed and help. She raged against the city's xenophobes, cruel slumlords, and brutal policemen, while also documenting her own challenges publishing her magazine, combating skepticism and misogyny as she distributed her own words in print. To experience what the poor endured as peddlers and beggars, she sometimes reported undercover, dressed in shawls, playing music on the streets, as rich passersby ignored her and other beggars gave her coins. To draw more people into her causes and attract subscribers, she made sure to have fun, too; she partied often with her fellow bohemian reformers, known as the Ragged Edge Klub, and became widely known as a Queen of Bohemia.
Norris was also known for documenting her own paranormal experiences: moments of telepathy with relatives, sightings of ghosts of loved ones, and accurate dream premonitions. In early 1914, she mailed out an East Side issue with a description of her recent dream that she would die soon, and days later her heart failed at a Ragged Edge Klub dinner.
In this talk, join Eve Kahn will summarize the accomplishments and paranormal writings of Zoe (as everyone called her), based on Kahn’s new book Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham U. Press).
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn is a regular contributor to The New York Times (where she served as weekly Antiques columnist, 2008-2016) among other publications. Her new biography of Zoe Anderson Norris is a finalist for a Sarton prize from the Story Circle Network and has been called "a daring story told with exceptional verve" (Amy Reading, Pulitzer finalist biographer of New Yorker editor Katharine White). Kahn's 2019 book, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan U. Press), won awards from groups including the Connecticut League of History Organizations.